In the life story of Adrian Leverkühn, the fictional biographical novel of a composer who sells his soul to the devil, Thomas Mann encapsulates all the developmental stages of the old Faust legend and links them to the pressing issues of our time, namely the catastrophic regression of the highly and overdeveloped spirit into archaic primitiveness. The temporal framework encompasses the years from 1884 to 1945, his own era. He himself described 'Doctor Faustus' as a life book of almost culpable ruthlessness, a peculiar kind of transposed autobiography, a work that has cost me more and drawn deeper from me than any previous one. The author's intense involvement in the writing remains palpable, chapter by chapter, despite the introduction of a seemingly omniscient narrator.